Open Source SaaS Finally Connecting With Managed Services

I’ve been hyping the convergence of open source, software as a service (SaaS) and managed service providers (MSPs) in recent months. But I have to admit, it has been difficult to find MSPs that actually run a large mix of open source SaaS systems. That all changed tonight at the MSP Revolution conference, when I met John Truitt, president of Kalleo Technologies.

Kalleo, based in Peducah, Kentucky, leverages Asterisk, SugarCRM, Nagios and GroundWork Open Source as part of its daily managed services business. The systems aren’t perfect — not yet, at least — but they reflect key emerging trends that will go mainstream across the managed services market over the next two to five years, I believe. Here’s why.

First, I’m not suggesting that MSPs should go entirely open source — nor should they remain entirely closed source. Hybrid, best-of-breed approaches are emerging. And there’s no denying the growing potential of open source to MSPs.

A few examples:

1. Asterisk, backed by companies like Digium and Fonality, is an open source PBX that’s catching on within small businesses. Similar to how Linux disrupted Windows and Unix, Asterisk is disrupting the traditional PBX phone system market. And in some cases, it’s disrupting voice-over-IP unified communications systems sold by Cisco Systems and other large networking companies.

Kalleo, for instance, originally thought Asterisk would be a nice add-on sale for managed services engagements. Instead, the reverse is true: Companies are reaching out to Kalleo for Asterisk phone systems, and Kalleo often is able to up-sell them to managed services, says Truitt.

Don’t underestimate Asterisk. Fonality, a major developer of Asterisk and open source telephone solutions, recently received more funding from Intel Capital. And Fonality plans to use the money, at least in part, for potential applications.

2. SugarCRM, the leading open source customer relationship management system, is catching on with hosting companies. Roughly 30 percent of SugarCRM’s deployments now involve hosted CRM, according to company CEO John Roberts. And other open source CRM providers — such as Compiere and Concursive — are aggressively pushing hosted applications.

3. GroundWork Open Source and Nagios are disrupting traditional management and administration tools like CA Unicenter, HP OpenView, BMC and IBM Tivoli. Some HP OpenView. Truitt raved about Nagios in particular, but he did concede some lingering challenges.

Most specifically, there are integration “gaps” between each open source platform, notes Truitt. He’s searching the market right now for a way to tie together those applications.

The opportunity for traditional MSP platform providers seems clear. Companies like Autotask, Kaseya, ConnectWise and many others already offer open APIs (application programming interfaces) that tie together disparate systems. Autotask and OnForce, for instance, recently announced integration work leveraging those open APIs.

Over the next few months and years, I expect those APIs to provide bridges between closed source and open source MSP applications.

Perhaps that’s wishful thinking. But I think it’s inevitable. MSPs, in some ways, are mavericks. They are breaking free from traditional server-based systems. And they’re demanding open connections between their tools.

6 comments

We cut our teeth supporting small shared hosting companies leasing cheap, un-managed dedicated hardware from HaaS providers. Since most of the systems were running Linux, we naturally turned to Linux and Open-Source applications for our in-house tools and those we deployed for our clients.

There are some great tools available, Nagios, Cacti, OpenNMS, CFengine and others. As you note, the major challenge is integrating these applications. How do you get all of these great tools into a single dashboard that is user friendly and functional. As APIs develop, I hope this improves.

For example, Pingdom offers a very low, though limited, availability monitoring solution. They are working on an API that would make it easy to offer Pingdom functionality directly within your management application.

If Facebook has taught us anything, it is to open up your services for others to leverage. I suspect smart software and service providers will continue to open up their systems to allow MSPs and others to develop customized, integrated solutions.

@Jeff: Nagios is a tool I heard mentioned multiple times during MSP Revolution last week. I don’t test tools myself, nor can I “endorse” a specific tool. But the buzz on Nagios in particular has been growing.

Very few people seem to make the difference between a Managed Service Provider using tools that monitor only and an MSP that uses tools that can actually perform automated tasks on the remote networks, which is what I’d call a real managed service.

The only tool I know which does this is http://www.handsfreenetworks.com, but I’ve tried it for a while and their GUI is terrible. It’s the most complex remote management tool available but it’s hell to learn.

I don’t think Nagios and the other Open Source solutions mentionned here do more than plain monitoring. You can set them up to learn remote networks, monitor computers, servers, but they’ll never let you create automated scandisks, or backups, or prevent spyware intrusions, or edit the registry of remote computers.

This is what the community of MSP’s need. It’s possible that Nagios can now do it – last time I checked it couldn’t. Or maybe something else is available at a decent price? Regards.

We use Nagios for monitoring and Altiris for management (specifically their Deployment Console). Altiris isn’t free but we are in the process of changing over to the MSP licensing that they have recently introduced. We make extensive use of VB scripts developed in house to extend the capabilities of both Nagios and Altiris.

By the way I spent several months doing research into moving to a more traditional suite of MSP products (level, autotask, etc.) and in the end concluded that the cost did not provide enough of a benefit over what we are capable of doing today with the tools we have. We still don’t have the integration that I would like to have and I plan on keeping an eye on commercial MSP products but I can live without the integration for now in order to keep my costs down.

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